I’m rlly frustrated bc I’m watching return of the Jedi and I just saw the scene where they’re talking about the sarlacc and I can’t stop thinking abt this one Tumblr post that’s something about how it wouldn’t be for that long bc he’d starve to death and Luke is like “tell him that r2. Tell him that he’s a dumbass r2. Tell him” and I’ve been googling for a billion years but I can’t find it and I rlly wanna find this post so if any of u have it plsssssss add the link and I’d die for u
i just realized something: think about padme amidala’s public image. nobody knew she was married. nobody knew who anakin skywalker was at all–he was just some random jedi trainee, and by the time anybody would have started paying attention to him in the public eye, they would have known him as darth vader. to the public, anakin became a faceless villain who always was who he was, no fall from grace needed.
so, padme. i’m sure she had supporters across the republic. i’m sure her time as queen of naboo was EXTREMELY well-documented, and honestly, based on her rotation of outfits, she was probably a full-on celebrity. she was young and brilliant and a passionate defender of her people, and even though the empire seized power in the end, i wouldn’t be surprised if the rebellion decades later directly descended from the ideals of her followers.
but think about the circumstances of her death from the outside. people probably knew she was pregnant by some unknown father, of course, but this is a universe with robot doctors–saying “she died in childbirth” would probably be like saying “she died of the common cold” today. not something that happens, especially for a celebrity politician with unlimited resources. and there must have been a child, but what happened to it? did it die too? as a media narrative, it’s flimsy at best, ESPECIALLY considering the timing of her death.
padme amidala, the woman who ruled a planet at 14 and sat stony-faced while every other senator cheered on palpatine’s rise to power, died under mysterious circumstances just as the government she’d defended crumbled. from the outside, it seems pretty obvious that she was assassinated.
if this was a universe that at all made sense, padme amidala would have been a household name among republic loyalists. her tragically short life, her noble self-sacrifice for the ideals she believed in, would have been LEGENDARY. when the rebellion rose, she would have been the name on everybody’s mind–do it in her honor, people would have said. finish the fight she started.
i know we can’t go back in time and change the original trilogy, but the sequel movies? come on. don’t tell me darth vader is the only looming icon in this franchise.
To make it extra tragic – in the EU it mentions that the coroner used some kind of hologram technology to make it look like she was still pregnant at the time of her death, to protect the twins from the emperor and Anakin by telling everyone that the children had never been born. Padme Amidala’s death would have been the tragedy of the century, the face of the lost democracy.
Okay but what if that celebrity factor got used? By, like, everybody.
To the Naboo people, she’s their beloved Queen. To much of the galaxy, she’s a loved and admired public figure and stateswoman. To the Republic loyalists, she’s their martyred supporter, the vanquished—murdered, they think—face of Democracy. To the Empire, she’s a useful idol, the Emperor’s colleague, murdered, they say, by Separatist forces or by Jedi, tragically dead and conveniently silent, beautiful and glamorous and perfect for starting a cult of personality on her behalf.
And here and there, among the various cultures, there are religious concepts like sainthood, ancestor worship, legends of dead protectors coming to life again to fight when they’re needed. And conspiracy theories, and wishful thinking turned speculation, and the Star Wars equivalent of tabloid newspapers.
The result? Padmé is the most popular and famous woman in the galaxy, a combination of Princess Diana, Mother Teresa, Che Guevara, Joan of Arc, Elvis Presley, Arthur Pendragon, Chuck Norris, and the Virgin Mary.
One of the most important Imperial holidays is Amidala Day, devoted to celebrating service to the Empire, the official story of the Empire’s birth, the Emperor’s home world, and the heroic Queen and Senator whom Palpatine claims as his staunch supporter. People paint their faces and make elaborate hairstyles or headdresses and put on their fanciest clothes; there are plays, and parties, and traditional Naboo dances and foods.
Vader hates it. This is about 60% of why the Emperor has made such a production of it.
Among Republic loyalists, a different story is told: a Queen Amidala who loved peace and democracy, who opposed war and worked tirelessly for ceasefires and peace treaties, who stood silently or wept as all around her cheered the newborn Empire; a Queen Amidala who was murdered by the Empire so he could create the fiction of her support.
Vader hates this too. It feels uncomfortably true, and threatens to undermine his resolve that she would have been at his side had she lived.
Rebels paint images of her on their fighters, hang holos of her on their walls, wear icons of her as good-luck talismans. There are exhortations, penned semi-anonymously by people who knew her, that she would have wanted people to join and support the Rebellion. The minimalist image of eyes, cheek dots, and paint-split lips are graffiti’d onto public monuments accompanied by words from her speeches. “Amidala Needs You” is a common phrase on Rebel recruitment posters.
Vader hates this most of all.
Statues and icons of her are made in a hundred different artistic styles and adorn the altars of a thousand worlds’ faiths. Mythologies are written about her: she stopped a Separatist advance with words once, appeared in a dream to a slave telling her where her transmitter was hidden, shot five destroyer droids with pinpoint accuracy before they got their shields up, stormed her own palace to take it back from the Trade Federation, cheated death at the hands of the Empire’s assassin, escaped with the help of the last of the Jedi, is still out there somewhere, mourning for the Republic on some uninhabited planet somewhere, training in secret lost Jedi arts to kill the Emperor, working as a Rebel agent or a disguised vigilante.
Vader dislikes this. But he also seeks them out and reads them, when he’s in a certain mood.
The tabloids regularly claim that she’s been seen working as a roast-traladon restaurant in some backwater suburb of Corellia, or navigating a spice freighter to and from Kessel, or singing at a nightclub on Nar Shadda.
Vader dislikes this too. He has to talk himself out of keeping an agent or three just to visit the places in question and make sure.
He isn’t often in a position to see teenage girls with Padmé’s face emblazoned across their tunics, or walls with familiar face paint next to “So this is how liberty dies: to thunderous applause” printed next to it. When he hunts down Rebels with her image on a chain around their necks for luck, he can tear them apart with the Force: a quick death, which is, ironically, the luckiest outcome available to them. Tabloids and legends can be read and dismissed, and he’s never had the opportunity to happen upon the fanfiction.
But when the Emperor commands, Vader stands at his side through parades and parties and celebratory addresses to the Senate, with Padme’s image on banners and holos, with Padmé’s image on stage saying words Padmé never said, with all the women and half the men wearing Naboo royal face paint, and accepts the pain of memory almost like a form of self-harm.
And when the newly-elected Junior Senator from Alderaan with a quiet grace that reminds him of her and a fire in her eyes that reminds him of himself asks him, at some interminable party, if he knew what she was like, he troubles himself to answer honestly.
I saw the tweets about this today, and I was like oh yeah, I remember hearing about that.
And then I saw the pictures and just— wow. What it would have meant to have these women in the movie, all this time. I can’t properly articulate it but it’s hitting me unexpectedly hard.
Wow thats a shame, even a nice old lady too. These Space Valkyries should have been left in.
I lived, ate, and breathed Star Wars from age 2 until 2005 when RotS finally beat the enthusiasm out of me, and I have NEVER, EVER in all my reading on behind-the-scenes and makings-of heard of these shots. It’s a shame there was no relaunched edit of the original trilogy they could have slipped these in OH FUCKING WAIT THERE’S BEEN LIKE 3 OF THOSE NOW.
Fuck. FUCK. Whoever decided to edit out and bury these needs to french kiss an angle grinder.
I want to see the old lady in the A-Wing. Seriously, it’s like, she’s somebody’s grandma. Some kid in the Outer Rim Territories got greased by the Empire for seeing something she wasn’t supposed to see, and her grandma, the bush pilot, decided “Fuck this, I’m gonna strap on an fighter and make the Empire fucking PAY for the moment it decided to fuck with MY FAMILY.”
DON’T. MESS. WITH. GRANDMA.
These are quickly being put into the “always reblog” category.
Whenever there is a war, there are women who are warriors. Then they get erased from history. Happens in real wars and fictional ones alike.
Less than 5% of general aviation licenses go to women. If these had been left in, you can bet that number would be higher.
^^^That knocked the breath out of me.
I just can’t believe they not only took them out, but refused to put them back in during the seventeen times they updated the movies. And of course the only possible explanation for this is: you do not belong here.
Literally though. How many stupid remasters have they done but THIS gets left out? Ugh
for the record the names of these characters are Sila Kott played by
Poppy Hands and Dorovio Bold played by Vivienne Chandler. I couldn’t find the name of the old woman though 😦
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Dorovio_Bold
“As well as her appearance in the briefing, footage of the character in a cockpit during the Battle of Endor was also filmed, but not used in the final cut of the movie.”
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Sila_Kott “Although played by British actress Poppy Hands in Return of the Jedi, Sila Kott was later dubbed over by an American man’s voice.”
Imagine being an uber driver and while giving some teen and his uncle a ride you end up getting pulled into a hostage situation/anti government rebellion forces
Han Solo did not sign up for this
To be fair, in this metaphor, the uber driver is in trouble with the local mob boss because he was ferrying cocaine and dumped it out the window when it looked like he might get pulled over, so…
So the uber driver hooks up with the sister of the guy who first hires him, and it turns out that their dad is the Deputy Sheriff, and things go downhill even faster than previously imagined when they hit up a local truckstop for a bite to eat, fuel drop and impromptu family reunion.
Truckstop’s run by an old friend who he won his car off that one time, and the dude’s hitting on the chick he’s hooking up with and it’s like come on man, don’t do this to me but then the girl’s dad is there and he gets hit over the head and shoved into the trunk of the cop car and it’s like oh, shit. Fuck. Chewie man, don’t let them take my car!
And then the kid, who had never been off the farm before he hired you, comes back with Green Beret-level skills to bust you out of jail and his sister, who was honestly kinda preppy, straight up MURDERS the mob boss. And then you get the plans to the DOD’s biggest single piece of equipment so you go to the middle of nowhere where it’s being built and you have some trouble with the locals, but somehow the annoying nerd speaks their language and manages to impress them, so you work together to infiltrate the military base. Oh, and the kid lets himself get captured so he can talk to his dad, and after a knock-down drag-out fight, the dad realizes that he’s been played his entire adult life by the corrupt politician overseeing everything, so he chucks the politician down the maintenance shaft of said politician’s high-rise just before it gets destroyed by the rebels, led by your friend in your truck that he borrowed with the promise that he wouldn’t put a scratch on it, but he knocks off your side mirror getting out of there.
100% certain han and lando once got married for a scam and forgot to have it annulled so they were technically married for several years and one day lando comes in and goes “real quick: are we solo-calrissian or calrissian-solo? also, i want a divorce” and han is like baby no where did i go wrong we can still fix this
#ostensibly it was for a scam but we all know the truth#they forget to get divorced until han is getting married again#do you think polyamorous marriage is legal in star wars#it has to be right#so han is accidentally married to like three people#and leia is kind of annoyed by this so he goes to lando#who doesn’t understand the problem because legally speaking he is married to a city-state#he solves a lot of problems by marrying them#he also creates a lot of problems but those are for future lando#not current lando who is currently explaining that he has built a complex tax scheme on his marriages#and his marriage to han is loadbearing#do you have any idea what this would do to his tax deductions han#it would destroy them#han hasn’t paid space taxes in years but it turns out he’s lando’s dependent and lando has actually been collecting a refund this whole time#han is offended and wants his refunds but lando is like no fuck you#if you did your own space taxes you’d be paying twice what i’m getting
Okay but if Han is neither living with Lando nor having <%50 of his supporting costs covered by Lando he wouldn’t be a dependent? Also spouses aren’t dependents, they are spouses, they get a personal exemption.
So what really would have to be happening here is that Lando is filing for them as Married Filing Jointly. And the only way for that to make sense without having any income listed for Han is if he’s claiming that Han is a stay-at-home house husband. Which is 100% more hilarious, if you ask me.
Especially because when Han and Leia get married that doesn’t change? Leia is off running the New Republic, so Han is totally home with Ben. And every April Leia and Lando have an epic game a sabac to determine who gets Han’s personal exemption that year.
those are the rules for federal tax law in america, on earth, where only human beings can be married to a single other human being at any given time
if we are assuming that in space it is possible to be polyamorously married to various forms of alien, humanoid and otherwise, with variable lifespans and definitions of intimacy, we must also assume that the rules around the tax laws created to incentivize marriage must also be different
‘married filing jointly’ makes very little sense for situations where you are married to three people who each have their own spouses who may not be married to you, and furthermore the tax status is only necessary if what you are trying to encourage is long-term monogamous relationships (which i don’t think the empire or the republic particularly care about). and dependency rules about co-habitation do not make sense for species whose biology or culture negates the possibility of co-habitation even in closely intimate relationships (and definitely doesn’t make sense if someone’s job requires them to spend most of their time traveling through space hauling cargo, or if the government has mandated they work on another planet for some unspecified period of time)
(there is also no meaningful definition of ‘annually’ in the context of space taxes, and therefore taxation periods must be defined per-planet as lived on by the head of household)
(we must also assume that each planet has its own tax structure, and therefore what we are worried about here are republican or empirical taxes, or as they are colloquially known, ‘space taxes’, the taxes you pay to the space government as opposed to your planetary government)
in theory we could assume that the space government simply doesn’t incentivize marriage, because why would they, but that doesn’t work for fic purposes. therefore the most logical reason for the incentive is liability. in that case, each marriage would define one person as the head of household, and the other as a dependent–with the head of household being the person who is legally liable for the other’s taxes and whatnots. if a HoH also has legal access to the assets of their dependents, in order to maintain the household, this creates a set of checks and balances (as it were).
the person in a marriage defined as head of household must therefore be someone that the dependent trusts to be able to keep their shit in order, and the person defined as a dependent must be someone the head of household trusts not to totally bail on them with a bunch of federal property. who’s who therefore becomes a personal choice between the married individuals.
if we assume this stacks, then let’s say person A is married to person B, and person B is also married to person C. if person A is HoH in the first marriage, and person B is HoH in the second marriage, person A still gets access to all the assets of person C as the dependent of their dependent. this means if your husband is thinking about marrying some fucking rando, you’re incentivized to make sure everything is on the level so you don’t have some shady motherfucker with complete access to your assets, or alternately, the ability to make you legally liable for serious space crimes. this is the primary disincentive for fraud–marrying someone who wants to commit fraud is a fast track to either getting all your shit stolen or else ending up in jail for a crime you didn’t commit.
alternately, if lando is married to han, and leia is married to han, and lando and leia are both HoH, things get theoretically complicated. things can get split up according to various formulas, or one of them (leia, it’s leia) can claim more limited benefits in exchange for giving up the majority, as well as surrendering access to han’s assets or liability for his dumb horseshit (”don’t look at me, call his husband, i’m not responsible for that dingus i just have the option to be. you think i want access to his checking account? he’s got three dollars and a pack of gum in there.”). marriage in that case is more a matter of having familial access to your spouse (hospital visitation, etc).
the majority of incentives (in the form of exemptions, credits, etc) would be for the HoHs of dependents who do work the government particularly needs done, because government contractors are the ones the government is most worried about bailing off to nowhere planet with a bunch of stuff. a liability-based system makes it possible for the space government to go to their spouse like “hey… your husband took off with all our shit, pay up please”. therefore having certain kinds of dependent would alter the type of HoH someone is in order to determine what benefits they receive and what liabilities they are assumed to have taken on.
so here’s our favorite adoptive space dad Bail Organa in Revenge of the Sith:
and here he is in Rogue One:
meanwhile, here’s Obi-Wan in Revenge of the Sith:
and here he is after the exact same amount of time:
I’d like some of whatever Bail is having on Alderaan and exactly zero of what Obi-Wan is having on Tatooine
well one of them is the viceroy of alderaan and the other one is living as a hermit in space nevada, sorry that obi wan isn’t keeping up his moisturizing regimen on Planet Sand Hell while bail organa drinks kale smoothies in the shade
myblog 